Friday, February 12, 2016

'WALK TO MORDOR' UPDATE: 514 miles down and 1,285 miles to go

I
continued my (virtual) “Walk to Mordor” during the past week by logging 10 more
miles since my last update. I walked/jogged five miles on Sunday and five more
miles today (Friday). So far, I’ve logged 514 total miles on this virtual trip
to Mount Doom, and I’ve got 1,285 more miles to go before I reach Mordor. All in
all, I’ve completed about 28.6 percent of the total trip.

In
relation to Frodo’s journey, I’m on the fourth night of the trip past Rivendell,
which is the night of Dec. 28-Dec. 29 on the Middle Earth calendar. I left off
my last update on Mile 504, which was where the Fellowship of the Ring crested
the top of a hill and spotted a snowcapped peak to the east. Six miles later,
at Mile 510, as conditions become cold and windy, the group makes camp and
spends the day of Dec. 28 at this point.

At
nightfall, the group resumes its travels and so far, I’ve logged four of the 15
miles the group covers on this night of the journey. The next significant
milestone comes two miles later, at Mile 516, when the group reaches a small
stream and begins following it west.

So
far, I’m on track to travel the 462 miles from Rivendell to Lothlorien, which
is the forest realm of the Elves, between Rivendell and Mordor, within the 2016
calendar year. To pull this off in a year’s time, I’ve got to travel at least
8.9 miles per week, that is, a little more than a mile a day. So far, so good,
since I covered a total of 10 miles this week and 56 miles since the start of
the calendar year.

For
those of you reading this for the first time, I began this “Walk to Mordor”
fitness challenge on Jan. 1, 2015. Using a book called “The Atlas of
Middle-Earth” by Karen Wynn Fonstad, fans of “The Lord of the Rings” created
this challenge by mapping out Frodo’s fictional trek to Mordor, calculating the
total distance at 1,799 miles. They also used the original "Lord of the
Rings" text to outline the journey, so you can follow their route by
keeping up with your total mileage.

The
folks who worked out the nuts and bolts of this virtual journey have divided it
into four parts. It’s 458 miles from Hobbiton to Rivendell, 462 miles from
Rivendell through Moria to Lothlorien, 389 miles from Lothlorien down the
Anduin to Rauros Falls and 470 miles from Rauros to Mount Doom. (Those
locations should sound very familiar to “Lord of the Rings” fans.) The hobbits
averaged 18 miles a day, but if you walk (or jog, as I sometimes do) five miles
a day, it’s possible to cover 1,799 miles in a year.